


Best House on the Block

by bethagain



Series: December Stories [6]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: 31 Days of Ineffables, Christmas, Christmas Decorations, F/M, Gen, advent fic challenge, how the Newton-Pulsifer household ended up with the best decorations on the block
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-07
Updated: 2019-12-07
Packaged: 2021-02-17 21:37:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 837
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21700147
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bethagain/pseuds/bethagain
Summary: Newt loves all the new-fangled fancy Christmas decorations, but they're all controlled by computer chips. Which means, they don't love him.
Relationships: Anathema Device/Newton Pulsifer
Series: December Stories [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1561195
Comments: 10
Kudos: 67
Collections: Aziraphale's Library Festive Fic Recs





	Best House on the Block

**Author's Note:**

> Day six of the 31 Days of Ineffables advent fic challenge! Today's prompt was _sleigh bells_

If Newton Pulsifer had his way, the Device-Pulsifer house would have had the fanciest Christmas decorations on their street. 

There would have been thousands of twinkling fairy lights, pulsing on and off to the music of Christmas carols, playing on weatherproof Bluetooth speakers just loud enough to hear when you stopped by the house to admire. 

Santa and his reindeer would look like they’d landed on the lawn, with Rudolf’s nose twinkling, Santa waving, and the other reindeer scraping the grass with their hooves, eager to be off again. The lawn itself would be bright with laser-light snowflakes, in changing patterns that would make it look like the snow was sticking, like it would be time to build a snowman soon.

But Newton Pulsifer didn’t get his way. 

Pulsing lights with bluetooth speakers required a computer program to make them work. Santa and those reindeer were controlled by a little black box with a switch on it, and inside that box was a microchip. 

All Newt had to do was go near them and the musical lights would fizzle. The speakers would fail to static and silence. The most movement Newt could get out of the Santa diorama was the shower of sparks when he tried to turn the thing on. He’d been hopeful about the laser-light snowflakes. But they knew perfectly well that they were products of technology and steadfastly refused to work when Newton pressed the button.

He’d tried all of these things and more, new ones every season. And every season, he’d given the latest experiment away to the neighbors. 

That wasn’t a bad thing entirely. Newt and Anathema’s neighborhood was a destination for its Christmas lights. People drove from miles around, cars backing up as they snaked around the neighborhood. The neighbors all got together and put a donation box on a fencepost at the end of the street, money to buy food and warm coats for families in need, and every night the box was full.

But among all this holiday cheer, for years the Device-Pulsifer house remained the plain one. Newt would get a little blue around the holidays, looking at their plain old white fairy lights that barely even twinkled.

So Anathema started buying him presents. She haunted the local antique stores. She searched online. 

The first present was a clockwork drummer boy with a key on his back. Wind him up and he’d march the length of the mantle, tap-tapping on his drum. Newt was fascinated. So fascinated that, one night while Anathema was out, he took it apart to see what made it tick.  
She came home to find the drummer boy tap-tapping his way across the floor and Newt sitting there watching it with a huge grin on his face. 

He’d taken it apart. And then he’d put it back together. And it _worked._

The next present was a mechanical bank. A cast-iron Santa stood on a roof, his bag of presents over his shoulder and the other hand held out. Put a coin in that hand and Santa would drop it right down the chimney, to be saved up for presents or whatever else you wanted to buy.

Newt took the bank apart, too.

And put it back together.

And it worked.

Anathema bought him a little tin roller-coaster that worked on just the force of gravity. It needed a little push after every time it went round, to keep it going. Newt took that apart, bent some of the pieces, and put it back together--and now it went round three times at least before you had to start it going again. 

Pretty soon, Newt was ducking shyly into the local ironmonger’s, looking for better tools. Half of Anathema’s sewing room was sacrificed to become Newt’s workshop. He stopped trying--and failing--to upgrade her old laptop and started learning to use metal shears, a hand-cranked drill, and an antique rivet press. His work table was littered with different size gears. Anathema learned to tread carefully, to avoid stepping on wayward springs. 

If you drive through the neighborhood now, you’ll see plenty of houses with electric reindeer on front lawns, computer-controlled trains circling upper floors, laser lights telling whole stories in pictures across the house-fronts. 

And then you’ll get to the Device-Pulsifer house, where the lights are dancing because they’re real gas flames. Where a life-size Santa doesn’t move until you take the candy-cane from his hand, and then he shakes with mechanical laughter before reaching into his bag, pulling out another candy cane, and winding down to wait again. Where reindeer with wheels for hooves pull a bright red sleigh around a roller-coaster track, round and round a dozen times for every push from a child. 

Where the music comes from a clockwork drummer boy and his pet clockwork dog, jingling real sleigh bells on his collar. 

The Device-Pulsifer house doesn’t have the fanciest decorations on the block, not by a long shot. But it’s known, far and wide, for having the best ones.


End file.
